Harbingers

Is this endless winter not a moibus loop after all?  Will spring be allowed to enter?  The autobahns are awash with melting snow from the center divides; my front lawn still sleeps under its white sheet, now obscenely ragged at the edges for such a neat neighborhood.  I have never been more ready for spring.

This pictured house, abandoned, purged, inert, is about to be hidden in blossoming bushes and green foliage once again. I, too, am ready for my renewal anytime now - I have survuved another winter and I deserve daffodils!

I see my neighbor in the right panel, Nathalie of Avignon, is also questioning if spring is really here.  The artistry of her photography never fails to pull me in. She is a poet who uses a camera.

I was wary of using the term "harbingers" in this blog title, because the word has snatched up political connotations as of late, a perfectly good word now bleeding like my black wool coat from wearing that fuzzy red scarf.  This is, after all, a poetry-based blog. 

I know there are those who say politics and poetry can lie down together.  Archibald MacLiesh says "Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world,"  and implies they should keep to their own sides of the house. Carolyn Forché's poetry says that personal is political. Though I agree with Forché, I hover in my wimp-mobile, twittering back and forth, never quite landing.

I did write a poem personifying departuring glaciers as old, unloved parents, no one paying heed to their leaving, but was told by several poets I could not do that.  There are those who told Robert Frost he could not write a poem about a stone wall. Well, I no longer feel sorry for myself, but I still feel sorry for the aspect of melting glaciers. I'll troop out the global warming poem again. We must write what we feel strongly about.

Robert Frost wrote about what he cherished, the fields and farms of his surroundings, the details of rural life.  He spurned religious mysticism, or the obstreperous vocabulary and allusion to mythology of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.  Yet Pound said he had read all of Frost's poems and learned about farming and life. Did you know Frost was still teaching at Bread Loaf, Middlebury College, when he was in his nineties? He was thought of as an unofficial poet laureate of the US. He philosophy was of the earth,  "I never take my side in a quarrel", or "I'm never serious except when I'm fooling."


Here is his poem on harbingers of spring - lucid, lastingly universal.

Spring Pools by Robert Frost

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect

The total sky almost without defect,

And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,

Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,

And yet not out by any brook or river,

But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds

To darken nature and be summer woods --

Let them think twice before they use their powers

To blot out and drink up and sweep away

These flowery waters and these watery flowers

 From snow that melted only yesterday.